My thoughts on involving students in FOSS and other stuff

Another Successful POSSE!

June 6, 2013

I’ve just returned from another successful POSSE (Professor’s Open Source Summer Experience). I’ve attended something like 20 different workshops and have organized around eight in my career and by far this was the best I’ve ever attended. (Transparency notice: I was one of the organizers of this workshop.)

POSSE Participants and Organizers

I’m involved with a Foss2serve team that has NSF funding to promote faculty and student learning within HFOSS projects. We’ve been building on Red Hat’s POSSE format to ease the onramp for faculty members who want to get involved in and get students involved in HFOSS. We’ve modified the original POSSE format to include six weeks of online activities that provide instructors with learning about FOSS tools and culture while forming community. We have a 2+day face-to-face meeting (this week ) where we built on the online activities and got into actually working with HFOSS projects. We are following up with a stage where participants continue to interact in small groups, providing support for each other while they incorporate HFOSS activities in their institutions.

POSSE Participants Working

Highlights of the meeting included Ruth Suehle from Red Hat who gave a great talk on how to tell non-FOSSers about FOSS and also spoke about Opensource.com. Joanie Diggs, co-team lead from the GNOME Assistive Team also joined us to provide much needed guidance in how FOSS projects really work. Michael Brennan from SecondMuse talked about extracurricular involvement in HFOSS and Tim Siftar from the Special Libraries Association talked about libraries as resources for disaster response.

But the best part of the POSSE is how we all formed a cohesive group and worked together. The energy was visible, the laughter pervasive, and the ideas frequent and fun. I’m proud of the efforts that every one of us put into figuring out how to support student participation in HFOSS. So kudos to all POSSE participants and I’m looking forward to both working with you and seeing what you’re doing!

Dinner with POSSE

Thanks to Sam Rebelsky, you can follow along in what we did. Sam did a remarkable job of documenting what we did. We are planning on running another POSSE and if you’re interested in joining us next time around, please contact me. I’ll add you to the list!

Related

Welcome, new TOS folks! (And old TOS folks — I see plenty of familiar faces in the photos). So glad to hear the POSSE light is carrying on — I’d love to come to one as a student in a year or two to see how the curriculum’s evolved by then. ;-)